Infinite-Sum Game on ESP-Disk’
Infinite-Sum Game is a curated selection of my solo piano performance in Palermo on May 13th, 2023, at Sala Perriera in the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa. I have the deepest gratitude first and foremost to Lelio Giannetto and Valeria, as well as Gabri, Luca, Yuki, Angela, Curva Minore, SIO, and the greater Sicilian musical community. It’s a great honor to have been embraced by the community in Palermo, to be able to spend so much time there, and to collaborate with so many artists who have become dear friends. And I am profoundly honored to be a participant in the historic, and continuing, legacy of ESP-Disk’.
My approach to the piano is unique, based on my lifelong relationship with the instrument. It is also universal, born out of the context of everything and everyone who came before and during. As a pianist I have been inspired and influenced in equal measure by Scriabin, Monk, Scarlatti, Nina Simone, George Antheil, Rubén González, Prokofiev, Cecil Taylor, Henry Cowell, Debussy, Alicia de Larrocha, Professor Longhair, David Tudor, Glenn Gould, John Cage, Art Tatum, and more, including my contemporaries.
Musically, my influences and inspirations range widely, and sometimes wildly, from my classical piano training, the cultural diversity of the SF Bay Area, West Coast punk rock, Kuumbwa and Eulipia Jazz Clubs, and The Cabrillo Music Festival to my piano-playing parents, dedicated teachers, my itinerant life, and most importantly, all the artists I’ve had the privilege to collaborate with over the years. As a result, my music is genre-bending, code-switching, omni-idiomatic, and intersectional. Philosophically, this album expresses the culmination, up to now, of my life’s experiences in dialogue with the universe and my fellow human beings. Some of these sounds and ideas can be heard on previous albums of mine, though each time is a unique variation and context. That said, I see this recording as the ultimate, and final, document of these works.
“Thollem is a modern griot who has absorbed sounds from every place he has visited.”
– William Parker, from Conversations II (Rogue Art)
Listening to Thollem McDonas play the piano is an astonishing experience. He has an innate ability to compose transcendent music using the piano as his expressive voice and to explore the depth and range of the instrument like no one else. Meeting At The Parting Place will take you on journeys across varied landscapes that flow effortlessly from one to the next — somehow emerging logically even in their unpredictability. Thollem creates a spectacular tapestry of different colored sounds reflecting his awareness, study and assimilation of countless influences. In Terry Riley’s own words, Thollem McDonas is ‘a true original.’
– Joan Jeanrenaud, Composer, Cellist (Kronos Quartet 1978-98)
Thollem displays a chameleonic ability to adapt to suit whatever musical context presents itself…There is more than one way to access the infinite.
Daniel Spicer, The Wire
Thollem dives headlong into fascinating unforeseen and bold musical adventures that make him one of the most interesting pianists of the current improvised music genre…the result is the natural consequence of being intrinsically eclectic at heart.
Eduardo Chagas, TomaJazz (Portugal)
“Terry Riley met McDonas at a party at former Kronos cellist Joan Jeanrenaud’s house and listened in awe to the pianist’s CD on the drive home. ‘He’s absolutely mesmerizing,’ Riley says. ‘He’s very free. He starts with an idea and you watch him develop it in a way that unfolds like a beautiful flower, organically.’”
SF Chronicle
Thollem’s keyboard flights unleash cascades of notes of seemingly impossible velocity and no matter where he goes tonally, it always seems right, fresh and satisfying. He should be on everyone’s listening list who appreciates great piano music. As an improviser, he inhabits a world uniquely his own, rhythmically, harmonically and formally. A true original. – Terry Riley
Thollem welds elements of jazz, blues and classical music into a mighty tower of song, then shatters his construct with the breathless bull-rush of a mystic improviser.
The River Front Times (St. Louis)
Meeting at the Parting Place is a true tour de force of spontaneous music creation;
a wonderful example of what happens when immense technique, boundless
inspiration and highly focused artistic vision converge.
Dave Wayne, All About Jazz
“Half pianist, half hurricane”
Steve Holtje, Culture Catch
“One of the most captivating pianists working today”
Rui Eduardo Paes, Jazz.pt
“His sound ecosystem is wet, like a rain forest dripping with life and death: shadowed in darkness but nourished by hot sunlight, teeming with crouching predators and bright birds exploding from the trees, their raucous bellows resonating and echoing through hollow canyons and caverns.”
Tom Djll, Signal To Noise (US)
SOLO PIANO ALBUMS
• The Reincarnation of Henri Herz (BandCamp, 2022)
• Thollem Solo (Astral Spirits, 2021)
• Your Letter Must Have Followed Me All Over The World (Two Rooms Records, 2018) – Microtonal piano music in collaboration with tuner Clem Fortuna
• Meeting At The Parting Place (Odradek Records, 2016)
• Dear Future, (WIld Silence, 2013) – Archival recordings of Thollem from the 70s and 80s
• Gone Beyond Reason To Find One (Edgetone Records, 2010)
• Racing The Sun, Chasing The Sun (Creative Sources, 2008)
• So Much Heaven, So Much Hell (Saravah, 2008)
• On Debussy’s Piano (BandCamp, 2008) – Thollem played 5 pieces Claude Debussy composed on the last piano he owned, 100 years prior to this recording.
• Poor Stop Killing Poor (Edgetone Records, 2007)
• Nuclear Bomb, Cave Painting (Pax Recordings, 2006)
for booking inquiries: contact@thollem.com